Why Does February have 28 Days?
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2021
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about why February only has 28 days; why early birds and night owls aren’t the only two chronotypes; and why the anchoring effect says you should always make the first offer when you’re negotiating.
Why Does February Have 28 Days? by Joanie Faletto
- Why Are There Only 28 Days in February? (2017, February). Mentalfloss.com. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55327/why-are-there-only-28-days-february
- Why Are There Only 28 Days in February? | Britannica. (2021). In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/story/why-are-there-only-28-days-in-february
A new study confirms that Early Birds and Night owls aren’t alone as the only two chronotypes by Cameron Duke
- Dockrill, P. (n.d.). There Are 6 Human Chronotypes, Not Just Morning Larks And Night Owls, Study Says. ScienceAlert. Retrieved December 13, 2020, from https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-say-there-are-6-human-chronotypes-not-just-morning-people-and-night-owls
- Dockrill, P. (2020). There Are 6 Human Chronotypes, Not Just Morning Larks And Night Owls, Study Says. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-say-there-are-6-human-chronotypes-not-just-morning-people-and-night-owls
- Doctors Confirm the Existence of Multiple Chronotypes. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/ru-dct112620.php
- Kalmbach, D. A., Schneider, L. D., Cheung, J., Bertrand, S. J., Kariharan, T., Pack, A. I., & Gehrman, P. R. (2016). Genetic Basis of Chronotype in Humans: Insights From Three Landmark GWAS. Sleep, 40(2). https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsw048
- Single-Item Chronotyping (SIC), a method to self-assess diurnal types by using 6 simple charts. (2021). Personality and Individual Differences, 168, 110353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110353
When Negotiating, You Should Always Make the First Offer by Reuben Westmaas
- Northcraft, G. B., & Neale, M. A. (1987). Experts, amateurs, and real estate: An anchoring-and-adjustment perspective on property pricing decisions. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 39(1), 84-97. https://web.missouri.edu/segerti/capstone/northcraft_neale.pdf
- Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2003). “Coherent Arbitrariness”: Stable Demand Curves Without Stable Preferences. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 73–106. https://doi.org/10.1162/00335530360535153
- Anchoring Bias - Biases & Heuristics | The Decision Lab. (2020, November 23). The Decision Lab. https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/anchoring-bias/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily. |
| 0:05.0 | From Curiosity.com, I'm Codygoth. |
| 0:07.0 | And I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:08.0 | Today, you learn about why February only has 28 days, |
| 0:11.0 | why early birds and night owls might not be the only two |
| 0:14.6 | chronotypes, and why you should always make the first offer when you're |
| 0:18.7 | negotiating. Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:21.3 | 30 days, half September, April, June, and November. |
| 0:26.0 | All the rest have 31, except for February, for some reason. |
| 0:32.0 | Why does February only have 28 days? The answer is way more complicated than you think. |
| 0:38.0 | Legend has it that the first calendar was created to keep track of festivals by the maybe mythical |
| 0:45.3 | founder of Rome, Romulus. |
| 0:47.9 | It was a 10-month lunar calendar that started in March with the spring equinox and ended in December. |
| 0:54.3 | That left a three month span in the dead of winter |
| 0:57.6 | that the calendar didn't even include |
| 1:00.0 | and you thought the week between Christmas and New Year's was useless. |
| 1:03.0 | Rome's second king was Numa Pompilius, |
| 1:07.0 | and he thought this was kind of weird. |
| 1:09.0 | So he revised the calendar to line it up with the year's 12 lunar cycles, which add up to about |
| 1:15.2 | 355 days. In the process, he introduced the months of January and February. But here's where things get superstitious. The Romans believed |
| 1:26.7 | even numbers were unlucky. So instead of just giving the 12 months 28 days each, Pampilius mixed up the number of days from month to month, so they were all odd. |
| 1:38.0 | But the sum of an even number of odd numbers, like 12 months. So one month had to lose a day to work out to |
... |
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